FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Why is there a line, and why did your hypothetical not mention the necessity of line-waiting previously? Why can't requests simply be made and granted in the order they were received? I doubt any of the people you listed actually have asked you for 10k USD, so shouldn't I get what I asked for now? I want it, you not giving it to me is theft by your own argument via Proudhon. Are you a thief? Nor is the fixed income really a substantive obstacle, I'm sure you own 10k worth of possessions that you could sell or hand over, and I'll even waive any amount above what you do currently possess if I'm mistaken.
Alternatively, I also am willing to "share" my resources with you, provided I also get to arbitrarily create a "line", place you at the back of it, and ensure that you never reach the front and hence that the sharing never actually happens.
I'm open to hearing how desirables (goods and services and more) are handled differently. Can you give me an example where they're not handled like kidnap hostages?
Okay:
The only difference is that in the case of merchandise, you never had it and had it taken away from you.
Yes, everyone treats this as a massively important difference.
Or, you could see it like Proudhon: the fact that you don't have it even though you need or want it itself represents theft.
Anyone could do this. No one does, for reasons that can be demonstrated by my request that you kindly give me ten grand in fungible US currency.
I perceive you to be arguing that the "Proudhon" interpretation of property being theft is one people should pay more attention to, or consider valid in some way. And indeed, I am very happy to consider your current possession of accumulated value as theft from me, because I want what you have.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
I don't understand - are you saying that in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating?
One of Hlynka's core arguments was that this was in fact the proper way to begin one's political reasoning from: not what you are willing to kill for, but what are you willing to die for. What comes above utilitarian calculus?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Sure, but if you graph political influence over time, I'm pretty sure by far the biggest change on the graph is 1776, and everything else is inconsequential. And notably, that's the one you can mostly put a smiley-face on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
The fact itself that people for the most part avoid engaging with hypotheticals is hugely telling.
I would like you to share some of your resources with me. Ideally I would prefer you to engage with this in a concrete sense by actually transferring a lot of resources from your bank account to mine, say about $10,000, or so but I'm happy to start by discussing the transfer in principle if you find engaging in hypotheticals to be more immediately useful way to approach things. If you don't have $10,000 cash on hand, I'd be happy to take deeds/titles/straight property and handle the conversion to liquidity myself.
And after writing the following:
Well, I didn't ask for an alternative "that works" or claim that there's an alternative that would work (even though there is and it does) did I? I just asked what an alternative might be. This is as hypothetical as it gets. The fact itself that people for the most part avoid engaging with hypotheticals is hugely telling. I mean, what risk is there? Why the reluctance and avoidance? Why throw up objections and attempts to dismiss? It's pretty wild, really.
...I think it would be "pretty wild" for you to ignore an instance of the exact sort of "sharing" you're arguing for, or for you to engage in reluctance or avoidance, or throw up objections or attempt to dismiss the very principle you've expended such effort to draw attention to.
I'd say I really need the money, which is entirely true, but at no point shave you argued that need should come into it, so I'll refrain from polluting your philosophical constructions in this manner.
Money please!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
I would like you to share some of your resources with me. Should I send you a venmo link, or do you prefer paypal?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
Not how politics work. It’s never over.
England has not had significant influence over American politics since, depending on one's accounting, either 1776 or 1812. Likewise, the Romanov dynasty ceased all significant contribution to Russian politics in 1918. The Japanese ended native Japanese Christianity in the 1600s, and it stayed ended for about three centuries. The 101st airborne marched into the south and ended segregation at bayonet-point, and at least that form of it did in fact stay ended right down to the present day.
Sometimes the show does not, in fact, go on. If you've noted that all of these examples involved mass-bloodshed, and most of them involved the sort of mass bloodshed we can't really even attempt to put a smiley-face on, well, that'd be why I'm generally a pessimist.
What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?
If your reasoning accepts that we are not living in the base reality, as both Materialism and Theism appear to do, then a lot of the old arguments seem to lose their meaning. If one observes how these arguments evolved, this should not be surprising: both the theists and the atheists very clearly expected and even demanded a clockwork universe. Both were wrong.
The only difference is that in the case of merchandise, you never had it and had it taken away from you.
A lot of people consider this to be a significant difference, enough that they have universally recapitulated social technology built on this distinction.
I just love how this model works. It's been around for a decade now. No one yet has succeeded in pointing out a significant, legitimate flaw in the parallels it presents.
It is certainly true that if you define away the flaws in your argument, then by your definition there are no flaws flaws in your argument.
You say you want a discussion. Discussion necessarily means give and take, other people considering your arguments and you considering theirs. If you insist on controlling both sides of a conversation, you're just talking to yourself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
The Dems have shown they respect the courts in at least some cases, e.g. Biden trying to ban new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, the courts striking it down, and then Biden effectively going "aw shucks guess we can't do that then".
...And the Republicans likewise "respect the courts" in "some areas", and "pursue legislation" in "some areas". The question is whether Republicans should pursue legislation in an area where the Democrats don't respect the courts, and further where it's questionable whether the courts respect the law. And further, how hard should they pursue legislation, given that there are many competing priorities.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
For some movements, one has no need to mount opposition, as the movement is self-defeating.
I think the ocean has too many waves
There's got to be a way to make them behave
The World would run better if it were run our way
You will not succeed in brainstorming a novel, viable alternative to ownership. You might learn something from the exercise, though, so have at it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
...And your argument would be that swapping "may" for "shall" would do for immigration control what "shall" in the Constitution has done for the right to keep and bear arms?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Elegantly put, much better than I managed. Thank you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident.
The last really significant federal gun control legislation was also in the 1980s, IIRC. This does not appear to have impeded enforcement of those laws when the Federal Government considered such enforcement desirable, despite similar "compromises" and "incoherencies". We also see very inconsistent and lackadaisical enforcement of these laws in a large majority of cases, the straw purchase prohibitions being a particularly egregious example, but it really does seem to me in these cases that the problem exists between chair and keyboard, not within the text of the laws. We also have examples, several of which @gattsuru has laid out at some length here, of how legislation Blues find inconvenient is simply ignored; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is my preferred example, but it seems to me that there are plenty of others.
It seems to me that political nihilism is spreading because it offers superior predictive value to the process-is-legitimate frame you prefer. If you disagree, I think it behooves you to engage on the details, rather than simply arguing by assertion. We can directly observe that the Feds and the courts routinely decline to enforce laws they don't want to enforce and have been doing so for decades, and often enforce "interpretations" of laws that do exist that converge on simply making shit up. We can directly observe that even repeated Supreme Court "victories" on specific questions of law change nothing, and we can infer that the Supreme Court backs down when faced with sufficient resistance from the states and executive.
The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it.
How? What is the core of the problem? Is it that laws say "may" rather than "shall"? Where can we see this actually making a difference in this or other issues of public policy? Why did they write the law so poorly, and why should we be confident that a new law would be written better? Because the nihilist argument is that ten years from now, whoopsy-daisy, it turns out this new law also had "compromises" and "inconsistencies" that, gosh darn it, mean we have to let in another twenty million illegals wouldn't you know it shucks howdy.
Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.
I'm looking for anything specific. I'm looking for a nuts-and-bolts argument about why the process you're pointing to actually matters, preferably with examples of it mattering in a way that resulted in durable facts-on-the-ground wins for my tribe, because the alternative is that we are being invited to accept paper "wins" that will turn out to not actually be wins when it's too late to do anything about it. I think our interests are better served by taking a blowtorch to the legitimacy of our "shared" political institutions, rather than trying to reform them. I'm open to arguments that I'm wrong, but it seems to me that table-stakes for such an argument is some actual examples of my side winning through the "legitimate" process. Otherwise, if your argument is that every law my side writes just turns out to not be written properly to give us what we want, and every law the other side rights is unquestionably perfect and does even more than they claimed it'd do when they wrote it, that seems odd to me.
You're running out of trust. The institutions run on trust. If one person doesn't trust the system, that person has a problem. If a hundred million people don't trust the system, the system has a problem. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, the system has a problem. You may think that's stupid and unfair, but at some point you have to engage with the realities of the situation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
How many illegals are here?
How did they get here?
Given that they are in fact illegal, how and why did existing laws and enforcement mechanisms fail to keep them out or remove them once they were in?
Why were these failures not anticipated when the laws were written? Should they have been?
If many previous laws did not work, why should we believe that passing additional laws would change things?
To what extent are these failures the result of willful policy? How would the new laws prevent such policies?
It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?"
Poor content: outdated/obsolete on subjects that change quickly or require absolute currency (it’s better to be lacking than to have erroneous/outdated material), trivial subject matter, mediocre writing style, unused sets of books (keep only those volumes used), repetitious series no longer popular, superseded editions (get newer edition), resources never reviewed in standard review sources, unneeded duplicates, material that contains biased, racist or sexist terminology/views, self-published or small press materials that are not circulating.
CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries
Bolded for the part that gets as explicit as possible, but of course most of the other criteria are easy to apply as well. I'm familiar with the general argument you're making, but I'm also aware that this is not how libraries actually work, and I decline to be a rube.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
That’s not what @FCfromSSC was talking about though. He was (in my perhaps incorrect reading) folding in murders that resulted from a reduced police presence over the next few years as ‘BLM deaths’.
It seems pretty clear to me that the reduced police presence over the next few years was a direct result of BLM, given that reducing police presence was an explicit goal of the movement. The increase in murders was an easily-predictable result of the reduced police presence. I am not claiming that BLM rioters directly killed 8.5k black people in the course of rioting. I'm claiming that they were bad at predicting the results of their actions, and their actions led very predictably to a lot of black people being murdered. Civil war would be much, much, much, much worse than BLM in this regard, not least because it is not obvious that it could be stopped once it got going. The direct violence would kill quite a few people, but it is easy to predict that the breakdown in social structure could easily kill a whole lot more, and in turn create lots of incentives for more ideological direct violence.
Lowering the minimum wage changes a whole lot of things, and it's hard to predict all the effects. Maybe it causes 10,000 bankruptcies. Maybe it also lets 1,000 businesses hire 10 additional workers each. How do these things balance out? Crippling the policing system is not like that; the effects are immediate and severe. Likewise for the economy. Likewise for the power grid, water treatment, food distribution, banking, the legal system generally...
I'm not sure why communication is failing here, so let me try again in simpler terms:
People like the idea of political violence because it seems like a straightforward solution to their perceived problems. They do not understand that while you may get to decide to start the violence, once it's started the other side has to agree to let it stop. They do not understand the fragile nature of our society, and how bad things can get on short notice if certain bedrock assumptions like "my job will pay me on time" and "there is food in the fridge and more in the grocery store" and "the lights turn on when I hit the switch" and "the police will come if I call them" no longer obtain. These assumptions are not derived from immutable features of the universe. The police can go away. The power can go out. The trucks might not show up to stock the grocery store. These things can happen. People can make them happen, if they believe it to be to their advantage, and a great way to convince them of that is to make them feel that they and their families are in danger if Something Drastic Is Not Done.
I did not and do not argue that all of this will happen. My argument is that it is much more likely to happen than people who talk about Civil War generally appreciate, and further that it is much more likely to happen to the talkers than they appreciate. It is, believe me, very easy to fantasize about your side putting the boot to the hated outgroup. It seems to me that such people, myself included, would be well-advised to spend a few cycles contemplating what it would be like to get the boot, rather than merely give it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
You're the one claiming elsewhere in this thread that there's a literal government agency that exists to threaten people in this situation into making these sorts of statements. I'm inclined to believe it! I'm certainly confident that the victim's family is under tremendous social and likely legal pressure to toe the line.
That wasn't enough to get Rittenhouse convicted. It wasn't enough to prevent the J6 pardons, or to cause those pardons to have significant costs. It seems to me that neither of those outcomes were predicted by you or others arguing the "Red Tribe is powerless" thesis.
Violence is never the solution for the weak
This is true, if one arbitrarily declares that anyone who achieves solutions through violence must therefore have not actually been weak.
which is what the right is
Are we?
It seems to me that we've gotten to the position we're in by attempting to cooperate with defectors. That position seems to be changing rapidly now that common knowledge of the defectors is spreading.
If anyone who is right-leaning engages with violent methods, people will make an example out of him and you will see far worse kinds of censorship than 2021 but for decades.
One of the things that I don't think most moderates have cottoned to is that enforcement of this sort of thing might not be a viable option any more. For the last several years, we've seen a consistent pattern of long-standing, load-bearing social norms abruptly dissolve, and the way this has repeatedly gone is that Red Tribers achieve common knowledge that the "norm" could not be applied to their advantage, and so simply stopped applying it to Blue Tribe's advantage. We saw this with sexual misconduct accusations, with character accusations, with appeals to rule of law, and many others. I think we've seen the beginnings of this pattern applied to political violence with the riots, Rittenhouse, the j6 pardons and now Luigi and Karmelo. You'll know for sure when notable Red Tribe violence occurs, and Red Tribers simply reject the appeal to "norms" en-masse.
Do you think, in the current environment, Red Tribers won't celebrate if a Blue Tribe politician has his strings cut, after years of watching their friends and neighbors openly wish for and celebrate lawless murder of Red Tribers? If so, I'd say you're quite the optimist.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Human imagination is a wellspring that flows eternal. Can you point to actual cases of knife use against bullies, even non-fatally, where the knife-wielder was considered in the right?
Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
I don't think so, no. Utilitarian calculus breaks down with infinites, and this is about infinites. This is not "this has [negative_bignum_utilons] for me", this is "I will not accept this." It's a decision, not a calculation. It's a willingness to accept loss/failure, not another move in the game, and the more absolute it is the better it works.
Where to draw the line is an open question. But there is a line, and the capacity to both draw the line and stick to it, come what may, are extremely important. It's well-known that small compromises lead to larger ones, and it is in this fashion that one moves from compromising to being compromised. By drawing the line, you move from "I will resist if it seems profitable" to "I will resist no matter what." Precommitment, in other words, the most durable sort of commitment. And such commitments are often decisive, especially in a crisis.
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